The 2019/2020 financial year will be very challenging for CM Health. The tensions between achieving financial sustainability in the context of high population growth, the high cost of providing health care for long-term conditions and the low socioeconomic households that many of our residents live in, are very real. 

Within this context, our priorities 2019/2020 are to reduce our deficit position of $21 million by:

  • focussing resources on improving people’s quality of life, where patients present unplanned and acutely to the system, and where CM Health is the default provider of safe, high-quality care
  • prioritising resources, as they become available, on developing services in areas where the healthcare system is achieving less than equitable access, compared to the other metro Auckland DHBs and for high-need populations.

The trade-off for these priorities will be that some initiatives and projects will progress more slowly during  2019/2020, as resources are diverted to the core services that we are required to provide. To meet CM Health’s objective of being financially sustainable in the future, we regularly review potential savings and cost-reduction opportunities.

It is important that we extract maximum value out of all of our activities through our key portfolios of work. The Every Hour Counts initiative is not only about improving patient flow, but also about enabling our staff and partner health professionals to spend their time on activities that add value to the patient experience. Every Dollar Counts is also about ensuring that we deliver value and are transparent in how we allocate resources.

In 2019/2020, clinical leadership will play an important role. We will be making changes to ensure that clinical expertise – in its many forms: medical, nursing, allied health and midwifery – is applied to decision making. This includes decisions around maximising the potential our workforce can add to the care of our patients, improving the value obtained from every dollar we spend and adopting new models of care.

We look forward to 2019/2020,  as we work to ensure that all of our resources are applied to those jobs that only a DHB can do. In particular, we will ensure quality and safe care for those who rely on our system, especially those who are acutely unwell, as we improve equity as quickly as we can.

Last modified: